Berlin

On the morning of March 13 Ehrhardt’s men, carrying banners with the imperial colors and wearing helmets emblazoned with swastikas, marched into Berlin. They were greeted at the Brandenburg Gate by Ludendorff and Kapp, the latter decked out in top hat and tails, befitting his status as titular head of the new government that now claimed to run Germany.

The legally elected government, meanwhile, fled the city, traveling first to Dresden, then on to Stuttgart, some 250 miles to the southwest. Before leaving the capital, the ministers issued an appeal to the workers of Berlin to resist the rebels by walking off their jobs in a general strike, a tactic that the Ebert government had recently condemned as Bolshevistic. The irony was not lost on Berlin’s factory workers, but they knew that a Kapp regime would be far worse than Ebert’s, and they accordingly threw down their tools and went home. They were joined by utilities workers, tram drivers, civil servants, sales people, waiters, and even some prostitutes. For the first time in its modern history, Berlin totally shut down. “At night it’s completely dark in our neighborhood,” wrote Käthe Kollwitz in her diary on March 17. “A darkness like one experiences in the countryside: totally black.” The strike was so thorough that the mayor of Berlin was obliged to get around town in an ambulance, disguised as an accident victim.

The putschists were in no way equipped to deal with resistance of this magnitude, and their problems were compounded by their own ineptitude. It took them two days just to find someone to type their manifesto announcing their seizure of power. Other paperwork was delayed because Ebert’s officials, in a brilliant act of sabotage, had taken away the rubber stamps necessary to the functioning of any German administration. Lacking money to pay the troops, Kapp ordered Ehrhardt to take the necessary funds from the State Treasury, but the latter refused on the grounds that he was “an officer, not a bank robber.” After four days Kapp issued a decree saying he had accomplished all his aims and decamped for Sweden, deeding his “authority” to Lütt-witz. The general had no opportunity to exercise his dubious powers because the military command, seeing that the putsch had failed, forced Lüttwitz to resign his command and called for the return of the legitimate government.

As Ebert and company prepared to reclaim Berlin, Ehrhardt’s disgruntled men began their march back to Döberitz. When a young boy mocked them near the Brandenburg Gate, several troopers broke ranks and clubbed him with their rifle butts. Someone in the crowd hissed, whereupon the soldiers fired point-blank into the mass, killing twelve and wounding thirty bystanders. (Ebert later granted the killers an amnesty and paid them the 16,000-mark bonus that Kapp had promised them for marching on Berlin.) Elsewhere in the city, battles between strikers and Freikorps units claimed several hundred casualties.

Although the Kappists had focused their action on the national capital, news of the putsch excited counterrevolutionaries across Germany, including Munich, where Adolf Hitler was working to build up the fledgling Nazi Party. Hoping to ingratiate himself with the putschists, Hitler, accompanied by one of his Munich backers, the racist publicist Dietrich Eckart, flew to Berlin. This was the future Führer’s first time aloft, and he was sick throughout the flight. As it turned out, the men landed in Berlin just as the putsch was collapsing and its leaders were fleeing. Disgruntled, they returned to Munich.

Visiting Berlin in the immediate aftermath of the Kapp Putsch, Edwin Embree, an American physician, was struck by how “orderly” the city seemed. Moreover, the food shortages, in his view, had produced some salutary effects. “No longer is the flowing belly and the swine-like neck the predominate feature of the Berliners,” he wrote in his diary. “With a diminution of their overfeeding has also come, happily enough, a sharp decline in suffering from cancer and appendicitis.” What Embree failed to notice was that Berlin’s dearly purchased “order” was highly tenuous and superficial.

Walpurgis Night

“[The Kapp Putsch] has thrown everything achieved so far into question,” wrote Ernst Troeltsch on March 23, 1920. So it had. One had to wonder about the loyalty of an army that had chosen to sit on the fence during the coup, and about the long-term viability of a political system that inspired so much hatred among its own citizens. The Kapp Putsch turned out to be the last of the violent postwar insurrections to ravage Berlin, but its failure hardly brought genuine tranquillity, for a new crisis in the form of extreme economic destabilization was fast taking shape.